“All People to Myself”: The Church as the Goal of History

It is the Holy Spirit who moves us beyond the imitation of Christ into union with Christ.

Since the Council of Trent, theologians have argued that the Roman Catholic Church is the realized kingdom of God on earth, the reunification of the human race, the mediator and manager of the treasury of merits, and Christ’s continuing incarnation. Reacting against the inflated ecclesial ego of Roman Catholic and “high church” traditions, generations of Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians have bent over backwards to reduce the church to a footnote in God’s unfolding historical drama.
There are various ways of diminishing the role of the church in redemptive history. Pietistic Protestantism tends to make ...